The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

by Stephen Hunter

  I will not worry here about firing angles, getaways, placement, any of that stuff. That is your department. I will not worry about the disposition of poor Felix; that is yours as well. Mine is simply the technical: how can backup Shooter X put a bullet into Dr. No’s cerebellum and leave no trace of his existence so that the apprehended Felix Leiter is held responsible for the shot, as proved by the ballistic forensics scientifically applied by experts. It’s the case of the bullet that never was.

  This is what I would do. First, I would provide Felix with the ammunition he is to use, having previously secured an example of it myself [this I had already done, basically on instinct, so I was ahead of the game]. So we give Felix a box of 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company under contract from the Italian government, declared surplus by the Italians, resold to American wholesalers, and packaged in a nice white box. The bullet Shooter X fires is basically identical to Felix’s and off the same cartridge-manufacturing line at Western’s St. Louis manufacturing facility.

  We have before us one of those cartridges. Let us examine it. It is blunt-tipped with a copper-coated bullet protruding from its brass case that has an unusually exaggerated length given the overall size of the cartridge. It doesn’t look like a missile so much as a cartridge case with a cigar stuck in it. It is a heavy, dense item for its size, speaking eloquently of its seriousness of purpose.

  You are aware, Commander Bond, that firearms and ammunition are not the stolid, imperturbable things they seem? They are plastic; they may be altered, customized, improved, their tasks changed, their performance envelope shifted, all kinds of magical tweaking and petting may be applied to them. That is what we are going to do with our 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge.

  (If you’ve forgotten or never knew: a cartridge is composed of several units. It contains a bullet, which is propelled down the barrel to terminal effect. The bullet is powered by rapidly burning—not exploding—powder, which is contained in a brass vessel often called a shell or a case. The rear of the shell, called the head, contains a rim which is machined to fit tightly, held in perfect alignment by cleverly machined grooves on the bolt, thus locking it into the chamber of the rifle. The head also contains, wedged tightly into its center, a magic gizmo called the primer, a chemically potent nubbin of specific materials that becomes a spear of flame when struck by the hammer, lighting the powder and producing the expanding gas that propels the bullet down the barrel and into history. Not that it matters, but the cartridge is an extraordinary device, so efficient and well designed that it has not been replaced in over a hundred years and will not be for another hundred years. But back to our cartridge, our 6.5 M-C.)

  The first thing we do is pull the bullet from the shell, easily done with a common reloading implement. We throw out the cartridge case, full of powder, with its primer. Don’t need ’em. This is about bullets, not cartridges. Now let us examine (as I have done at length) what is before us. It is 1.25 inches long. It weighs 162 grains. It is copper-covered, and its copper covering is somewhat thick, thicker than normal, as it is designed to be a hard object that does not deform when it strikes flesh but penetrates deeply. The copper is wrapped around a lead core, which can be seen by looking at the base of the bullet, observing the lead interior where the copper hasn’t covered.

  We put this bullet in a vise, upside down. Or we put it on a lathe, horizontally. Any advanced hobbyist’s shop has one or the other. We drill a .200-inch tunnel through the latitudinal (lengthwise) center of the bullet, that is, through the lead from the base, up toward the nose of the bullet, though we stop at 1 inch depth, leaving the nose of the bullet intact.

  Now what have we got? We have a bullet that weighs probably 20 grains less than it did originally but has been substantially altered in terms of its performance, without sacrificing any of its accuracy.

  Next we return the bullet to the vise and we carefully saw or file off about an eighth of an inch of its blunt nose, removing enough copper to open up the lead (which is much softer) to the impact point of the bullet.

  It is now substantially more volatile than it was, and instead of being counted upon, by virtue of its structural integrity—its hardness—to penetrate and stay more or less together on penetration, it may be counted upon to disintegrate when it strikes a living target, particularly if it strikes the skull or other bone structure. That is because of two dynamics: first, the nose of the bullet, which is now soft lead, will rupture on impact, peeling backward, almost blooming like a flower. Second, from within, the bored-out center has left the whole far more fragile; it will atomize in the violence of the explosion. Expect massive brain damage if the round hits the brain.

  Next we take that doctored bullet and reload it in a case for shooting at Dr. No. But wait! We threw out the Mannlicher-Carcano case and its powder. Why, we have a dressed-up bullet with no place to go. Or do we?

  Here’s the key: we reload that bullet into the case of a cartridge called the .264 Winchester Magnum!

  How is such a thing possible? Stop and think, Commander Bond. The 6.5 mm Italian cartridge is simply measured in metric-system terminology: 6.5 mm equals .264 inches diameter, or close enough for government work, like assassinations. The Carcano bullet fits neatly into the .264 Win Mag case and produces a new cartridge, the hybrid .264/Carcano, which slides neatly into the chamber of a .264 Winchester Magnum rifle. In the interest of making this less boring, I simplify. You might have to make slight adjustments to the hybrid cartridge or the rifle to get it to fit. The actual diameter of the 6.5 is .267, three thousandths of an inch larger than the barrel diameter of the .264 rifle. That might make a difference in the cartridge fit to the chamber, but it doesn’t require surgery to fix, only minor alterations. For example, you might turn the Carcano bullet on a lathe against a hard blade held at a precision measurement and whittle it down three thousandths of an inch. Or you might “neck turn” the cartridge casing, meaning you mount the shell in a fixture and rotate it by hand against a blade set to a particular depth. Benchrest shooters do this all the time, because manufactured cartridge shells are frequently inconsistent in their neck thickness, and in that game, regularity—ZZZZZZZZ! Wake up, Bond! More coffee, damn you!—is the key to accuracy.

  What have you accomplished?

  First of all, you’ve made the bullet, now explosive, much more lethal. So what? It was lethal to begin with, as any object that strikes a human skull at over 3,000 feet per second will result in death. The subject, I assure you, won’t notice the difference. He won’t be deader with one round than the other. There is no deader than dead.

  More important, you’ve made the bullet more accurate. Not in itself, but now it can be fired in the Model 70 Winchester with, as mine has, a Unertl 10X Vulture scope, one of the best, if not the best, rifles currently manufactured in the United States (of course the idiots are changing it next year!). And absolutely the best scope. The reasons a rifle is accurate have to do with a variety of factors, all of which the Model 70 enjoys and the Mannlicher Model 38 does not: the precision fit of metal to metal and metal to wood; the crispness of trigger pull; the fit of the rifle to the human body; the precision with which the scope has been mounted to the receiver; the quality of the rifling in the barrel and the kind and grade of metal used in the barrel; the quality of the glass in the optical system. Maybe there are others that I have forgotten, but you get the picture: the shooter with the Model 70 has extraordinary technical advantages over the shooter with the 38, and this is before the quality of the shooters, their experience, their natural levels of talent, their strength, health, stamina, and mental preparedness, are factored in.

  You’ve made the bullet invisible. You say, do you not, Commander Bond, sir, You’re mad! I am not at all.

  Here is another key point: by making sure the bullet explodes upon striking the skull and renders itself into fragments and powder eviscerating the cerebral vault, you guarantee that it cannot be read for rifle signatur
e! That is, no piece will be recovered that will bear any marks from the lands and grooves on the interior of the barrel it was fired through. It cannot reveal its fraudulence. It cannot be linked to Felix Leiter’s barrel, but it cannot be linked to any other barrel either. From the physical evidence available, there is no suggestion or inference that you, Commander Bond, were firing your fine Model 70 at almost the same time poor Leiter was firing his Eye-tie eyesore.

  Don’t the witnesses hear two shots when there was only one?

  Not at all. You’ve seen—good God, Bond, you’ve starred in!—movies with silencers, no? Of all the Hollywood gun gimmicks, those devices are the most accurately portrayed. No, they do not work on revolvers, and no, they do not sound like a midget sneezing. But a suppressor—the real name—can blunt and diffuse the sound of the report considerably, so that people around it are unable to associate it with a gunshot and equally unable to say from what direction it emanated. Your Yank colleagues in the war, the OSS, fixed them on High Standard .22s and Thompson and Sten submachine guns and used them creatively; you Brits had a gizmo called the Welrod pistol, same thing. I’ll spare you the long description, since I know you’re drifting, drifting, drifting, but a bolt-action rifle is admirably suited for such a device, which consists of a tube attached to the muzzle. That tube contains a series of baffles or waffles within it, a series of chambers and holes so that the expanding gas is slowed down as it wends its way through the thing, until it escapes with a fizzle rather than a pop. Any competent machinist can put one together for you in a day; or you can obtain a professionally manufactured item, as they’ve been available to certain markets for a long time. It so happens that in my collection, I have a Schalldaempher Type 3, the 8 mm silencer the Luftwaffe paratroopers used during the war. They’re pretty rare, but a friend of a friend wanted to move one he’d brought back and . . . you can guess the rest of the story. Out of curiosity and enthusiasm, I went ahead and machined a steel application to fit it to my Model 70 so that affixing the German device was a snap, even with supersonic ammunition, which emits a crack downrange but not at the shooting site.

  Oh, I sense your suspicion. It all turns, does it not, the deception, the getaway, the mission itself, on that bullet. How do you know the bullet will explode? In gun events, something always goes wrong, something anomalous or untoward happens, nothing can be predicted with 100 percent confidence, it’s too big a risk, and on and on and on.

  I left the best for last. This .264 Winchester Magnum isn’t just any cartridge. It’s brand-new from New Haven, a cartridge designed specifically for western plains game shooting—that is, long-distance shots at antelope and mulie way out beyond the briar patch, possibly in the next county. It shoots flat, it shoots fast. It shoots faster—I’m talking about bullet velocity—than any bullet known to man. The metallurgy of the Model 70 is such that, unlike the 38, it can stand up to the highest pressures of modern chemistry that the geniuses at Olin can conjure. That means our doctored bullet will strike Dr. No not at the velocity of a Mannlicher Carcano, which is just under 2,000 feet per second, but at the full vel of the .264, which is over 3,000 feet per second. It will explode! It is guaranteed by the laws not of man but of God: that is, the laws of physics.

  And still more. If it leaves any trace amounts of metal in the destroyed head of Dr. No, and the autopsy doctor manages to salvage them, the only possible test will be metallurgical. By looking with an electronic device, they will be able to determine by comparison with other metallic samples what kind of bullet felled Dr. No. It will prove undisputedly that Dr. No was shot with a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano bullet manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company and no other.

  I’ve appended a drawing to chart these developments.

  I want a nightful of martinis for all this labor, Bond, and the sooner the better.

  There was no signature, of course. I read it over and over, then burned it and its envelope in the fireplace, having committed the salient points to mind. I had trouble sleeping, I was so excited, but eventually, the long day of travel caught up with me and I drifted off.

  The next morning at breakfast, I said to Peggy, “Sweetie, I think we should take a weekend in Virginia. I haven’t seen Lon in several years, and I’m feeling bad about it.”

  Peggy said, “But Will’s team is playing Gilman in Baltimore on Saturday. He’ll be so disappointed if we miss it.”

  “Oh, gosh,” I said. “Oh, I hate to disappoint him. On the other hand, Lon is family also, and I feel that we haven’t seen him in too long. It’ll be okay with Will; he’ll understand?”

  Peggy knew when I had my mind set on something, and she also knew my defying her was so rare that when I did so, it was for a purpose. She relented. Such was the rarely deployed but nevertheless uncontested power of the husband, father, and provider in those days. I called Lon that afternoon—it was an easy call from cousin to cousin, sure not to rouse any suspicion from Mr. Angleton’s theoretical eavesdroppers, so no subterfuge was required—and told him we’d be down for a visit and dinner on Saturday. That night I had a man-to-man with Will. He was never a rebellious or resentful son. He understood, and by that time, the boys were old enough to be left alone, so there were no difficulties with last-minute babysitters.

  I had one last task other than convincing Lon to join my little crusade. That was to recruit a third member to the team. If Lon was to handle the shooting and I the driving and logistics as well as running Alek, I needed an action guy who could navigate us out of trouble’s way and handle with aplomb any unseen difficulties or tough stuff that could come up (though I had planned assiduously to avoid that) while Lon and I concentrated on our task. I needed someone who was a field agent’s field agent, slick, quick-thinking, tough, with a burglar’s guts. Naturally, I chose a burglar.

  I will call him Jimmy Costello, not his real name, because he has sons alive in the Washington, D.C., area, all, like mine, prosperous and well-regarded members of the community. I want no shame affixed to them on account of their father’s deeds. Years later, I wrote the middle one a letter that got him in to Yale; it was the least I could do for Jimmy Costello.

  Jimmy was in his forties by this time and well known in the intelligence trade. Though we assumed he had learned the trade on the far side of the law, he had somehow turned to the side of us angels and now worked strictly for the Agency or the Agency’s friends, some other agencies, and a number of divorce lawyers. He may have been the best burglar in Washington. He could get into any place because he had a natural genius for locks. I’m guessing he was raised in the locksmith’s trade, as no one could pick up so much any other way. He simply looked at a lock and understood how it worked, and carried with him always a set of picks and, in a matter of seconds, could spring any secured door. Safes took a little longer, but not much. He had no fear of heights or of walking at midnight along the precipice of an embassy roof, gymnastically lowering himself to a window under the eaves, hanging by one hand from a gutter and with the other popping the lock, then propelling himself through the open orifice. Our embassy section used him to plant microphones and wire, and with his nimble fingers, he could loot an inner sanctum of its secrets in a matter of minutes, then be gone and leave no trace of having been there, and from that night on, we were a third party to any discussions between Igor and Boris and their supervisor just in from Ye Olde Country. I don’t know if we used the intelligence cleverly or not, but we got it cleverly. The FBI used him against both Sov agents and the Italian mafia; divorce lawyers against wealthy philanderers, so that after the proceedings, they were not so wealthy. He could have stolen the recipe to Coca-Cola for the Pepsi people if it had come to that, and he could have gotten us the bomb diagrams if we hadn’t beaten the reds to it.

  The best thing about Jimmy was his loyalty. He could be counted on. He was a stand-up guy; all you have to do is look at the history of the Irish to understand how that attribute ran in his veins. He would have kept mum to the point of torture; it was bred
into him by long centuries on the bog plotting against my ancestors, and leaving them dead more often than not, and never snitching when caught, out of fear of facing the eternal hell of the traitor. That he would never be; that he never was.

  His other skill—it goes with his profile—was his charming brazenness or possibly his brazen charm. He had that Irish gift of conviction, and when the sneak wouldn’t do, bullshit would. He could talk you out of your underpants and send you home happy. I suppose he was a complete psychopath, but he was our psychopath, and that was exactly what the proposition demanded.

  I met him in the bar of the Willard, where he hung out every night when he wasn’t working.

  “Jimmy, me boy,” I said in my phoniest movie brogue, a joke between us.

  “I am,” he said, affecting his own version of a brogue, which he’d probably learned from Bing Crosby movies, “and how’s his eminence Mr. Meachum?” He always called me Mr. Meachum, as if I were of the castle and he of the cottage, and no amount of argument could convince him to do differently.

  “Don’t know about his eminence,” I said, “but I’m fine.” It was an old line, but he pretended otherwise and laughed.

  We exchanged banal chitchat for a few minutes, each consciously eyeing the room to see that no known adversaries happened to be there. When we were satisfied that we were publicly in private, we proceeded to business.

  “Might you have a few days toward the end of the month for your old pal Meachum?”

  “I might, though I am busy this time of year. Is there any flexibility?”